Apple iCar

Apple iCar - 10 Things We'd Expect

Tom Harrison

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January 07, 2013

Rumour has it that before Steve Jobs died, he was toying with the idea of designing a car - or an “iCar” in all likelihood. Judging by Venus - the giant aluminium yacht Jobs and Philippe Starck penned collaboratively before his death - it would’ve been a looker, with vast expanses of glass and exposed brushed brightwork.

As we can only speculate, here’s carbuzz’s top ten things we’d expect to see if Apple decided to take on the world’s finest established carmakers...
 

Updates/Design

Apple would trot out updates to the iCar every year without fail via elaborate revealing ceremonies. Watched around the world, fans would queue for hours to pick up their new cars. Though gorgeous, the updated iCars would be inexplicably missing  features and add have new ones you didn’t want - but invariably had to have.
 

 

Naming

Car manufactures use ridiculous naming conventions that usually make little sense, BMW have the ‘X3 sDrive18d M Sport 5dr Step Auto’ for example. Apple would keep the model names logical, there would be the iCar, closely followed by the iCar 2 then a city car version, imaginatively called the iCar Mini.
 

 

Complaints

Got a complaint? Good luck getting it heard. Expect to be told you’re driving it wrong, need a bumper to make it work properly or to just deal with black paint that scratches easily.
 

 

Colours

Henry Ford was famous for saying customers could have ‘any colour so long as it was black’. Apple would be more generous, white would also be available...

 

 

The Key

Physical keys are so last week. We very much doubt Apple would supply the iCar with a key at all in fact - or an instruction manual for that matter. No, instead they’d have you buy an iPhone and download the iCar App - thereby transforming the phone into a remote key fob. 

 

Like existing cars with keyless entry, the car would unlock when the owner tugged on the door handle, as long as the key - or phone in this case - was in their pocket. However, Apple would never dream of sullying their design with something so cumbersome as a door handle - oh no. Instead, the owner would need to swipe their finger across a touch sensitive panel, after which the door would pop open electronically...
 

 

Maintenance 

Ever tried to open up an iPhone? Nigh on impossible. We’d expect an iCar to have a bonnet that could only be opened by Apple’s technicians - resulting in frequent trips to the dealer (or Apple Store) for such trivialities as refilling your washer fluid.
 

 

Fuel Filler

Fuel fillers are a standard size across pretty much all cars - meaning you can fill a Ferrari from the same pump that’s just been used to fill a Fiat. Not so with the iCar - Apple would insist all filling stations adopt special pumps sizes specifically for iCars. Because they can.
 

 

Navigation

Whereas most cars’ inbuilt navigation systems rely on specific satellites and the carmaker’s own software, the iCar’s sat-nav would use Apple’s own mapping software - Apple Maps. As such, buyers could expect to find themselves nowhere near where they wanted to be the majority of the time.
 

 

Lawsuits

Apple’s lawyers would be kept busy with the iCar. Just like they’ve been attempting to sue so many other technology firms, we’d expect a raft of court cases against car manufacturers for daring to steal innovative ideas like touchscreens - or white paint...

 

What else would you like to see, or what do you reckon the Apple guys would come up with?

source:http://www.carbuzz.co.uk

Google's Trillion-Dollar Driverless Car

Google's Trillion-Dollar Driverless Car -- Part 2: The Ripple Effect

Part Two of a Six-Part Series

While Part 1 of this series laid out the significant benefits in safety and savings that could come from a driverless car, there is an old saying: One man’s savings are another man’s lost revenue.

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The fact is that a driverless car would slash hundreds of billions of dollars of annual revenue, or even trillions, from all sorts of entities: car makers, parts suppliers, car dealers, auto insurers, auto financiers, body shops, emergency rooms, health insurers, medical practices, personal-injury lawyers, government taxing authorities, road-construction companies, parking-lot operators, oil companies, owners of urban real estate, and on and on and on.

At the same time, the driverless car will create enormously lucrative business opportunities to serve new customer needs.

I’ll turn first to the revenue that is in peril and then examine the opportunities.  I invite you to offer your own ideas on potential business threats and opportunities. Please share them in the comments section below.

While car sales might initially boom, as the fleet shifted to driverless cars, sales would then fall off a cliff—and new and used car sales add up to a $600 billion-a-year business in the US. Any drop in sales would also affect auto finance companies, which write loans for almost 70% of new car purchases and half of used car purchases. Many parts would disappear from cars: Who needs airbags if you aren’t going to crash, or backup assistance when the car parks itself? The amount of steel used in cars would drop, because cars wouldn’t need to be as massive and sturdy. Body shops would mostly disappear for lack of business.

Auto insurers, which collect more than $200 billion in personal auto premiums each year in the US, would initially see profits rise as accidents declined and payments to customers dropped.  They would, however, eventually see something like 90% of premiums disappear. In fact, the US model of mandatory personal auto insurance might become archaic.

Emergency Room by French-Danish artist Thierry Geoffroy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Emergency rooms would lose millions of patients a year, and hospitals would have hundreds of thousands fewer people who needed to stay overnight. Health insurers would have to give up revenue as car-related injuries plummeted.

Personal-injury lawyers would see car-related cases all but disappear. In fact, the trend is already moving in that direction because the spread of cameras and sensors in cars makes it much easier to document who is to blame in an accident and removes the gray areas where lawyers may get involved.

If cars are in nearly constant use and can come when called, the need for parking almost vanishes. One MIT study claims that, in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area. Other estimates are that there are as many as 2 billion parking spaces in the U.S., about the size of Connecticut and Vermont combined. Much of this valuable real estate could be reclaimed for more beneficial social and economic purposes. At the same time, property values, especially in cities, would decline as additional supply becomes available.

source:forbes.com

Sony Xperia Z

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Whether you're at the local beach or backpacking in the caves of Vietnam, having a phone that can withstand the elements isn't only practical, but will also give you that added peace of mind.

Let's face it, many of us have either lost, or nearly lost, a handset due to an accidental dunk in the pool or a tumble on the sidewalk. To make sure you can avoid this next time, CNET rounded up some of our favorite waterproof or rugged devices that'll let you take on the outdoors (or the next pool party) with a little bit more ease.

Let's begin with the Sony Xperia Z, a handset that impressed us last month during CES 2013. Sleek and sophisticated, the Xperia Z shows us that you don't have to be a clunky handset to be waterproof (though they do exist and you'll see some on this list that we like). It also packs a zippy 1.5GHz quad-core S4 Pro processor, a 13-megapixel camera, and a vivid 5-inch screen.

Read more: http://www.cnet.com/2300-6452_1-10015747.html#ixzz2KyU9yhZq